How do you northerners train in winter?

[IronFist]

I train indoors

IronFist

[rubthebuddha]

sweeeet. inic's on the mend.

[Laughing Cow]

Weekdays:
Indoors work on stances, silk reeling, single movements and similar.

Weekends:
Hit the running track in the Park (7 min. on Bicycle) at 06:00am and also do forms and other training in the center of the track. Normally do 1 1/2 ~ 2 hours.

Example:
Different leg kicks step combos for about 150 meters turn do a different kick step combo, etc.

This kicks also work wonders for your flexibility and I don't need additional stretching.

Luckily we hardly ever get snow and temps don't drop much below -2 C at night.

[harry_the_monk]

It has snowed in Central London for the first time in about 10 years, so I got a chance to snow practice yesterday with some friends. It also ended up being a much more balance type workout, but was good. It made us practise our horse stances downwards rather than with outward pressure so we couldn't fall. ( which is if I understand correctly the right way to do them.)

It was cold to begin with but after qigong practise for an hour we were quite warm and training in just our t-shirts. Falling on the floor was also more on the agenda, so we got a chance to develop some breakfalls and strengthen the body(once the snow had been compacted to ice it was reasonably hard to land on.)

We are also looking forward to warm summer weather.

[SaMantis]

LOL IronFist, indoors is the place to be I guess. I usually hit the stationary bike for a couple minutes a day, do bits of a tai chi form and 13 postures.

The snow workout is still pretty cool -- I'm lucky because the landlord takes care of shoveling it away from the steps. And the ice underneath will make you practice breakfalls, whether you like it or not. Maybe if I hit the ground enough times I'll become a master of Iron Butt.

I noticed the same thing about horse stance -- the ice won't let you push outward, but you've still gotta get low or you're gonna slide.

inic, you're not going running this weekend are you? The temperature is supposed to be like ... 9.

[Suntzu]

Worst thing was that the leaves are off the trees, so all my neighbors could see me flailing around in the backyard.

atleast u have trees… my backyard is a open book… and the sun just beems dwon on me with disrespect… I KNOW my neighbors think I'm crazy… wait until I get my big azz tire… then things will get interesting…

[ricksitterly]

I am usually residing either in Albany or Poughkeepsie , upstate New York (but not THAT upstate). There always seems to be plenty of snow. I favor going deep into the woods, at least 5 miles or so, dragging with me a 45 pound weight plate by a rope. Depending on how you drag it, you are working different muscle groups. The deep snow helps to build leg power. In addition, I will strap weights to my ankles and sometimes wear a backback with additional weight. I climb the trees, and jump down into the snow to practice falling/ landing. I do kicking line drills in the snow and I practice my punches and hand techniques on the trees, which conditions my hands and knuckles. This is how the old masters trained thousands of years ago. One time, while training in the woods, I was attacked by a wolf and I killed it with my knife. You never know what will happen in the woods, when you return your whole body is sore. It is among my favorite training methods. When I get tired of dragging the weight, I then start picking it up and throwing it forward in my path.

[inic]

sorry but i feel like i'm reading a fiction story when reading your post. theres no way you can do all that alone, you NEED another person with you. and being attacked by a wolf?? first of all, wolves dont attack alone, always in groups. if a wolf is alone, no way is it attacking a human. and you'll need more than a knife to stop it, if it does attack. wow, and i though I exaggerated!

[SaMantis]

Ok wait a minute. Wasn't that whole training scene done in Rocky IV?

[ricksitterly]

i often take a training partner with me into the woods. it comes in handy in case of emergency to have someone with you. but "going out there alone" is not as harsh as you make it sound. These arent the adirondacks, they're about 150 acres of woods bordering my neighborhood. Rocky did drag logs through the snow in part 4, but surely the movie producers weren't the first people to think of that. I dont claim to have invented any of these training methods, i've picked them up along the way. as a kid (and even now), whenever i heard or saw something about training, i would be the first to go out and try it. "dont try this at home kids". i grew up practically in the middle of nowhere, so was always out camping/hunting/hiking/ whatever. wolves often do hunt in packs, however there simply arent that many of them around here, and most of them are starving, which is probably why the one attacked me. people usually believe the story more when they see the scars on my leg and arm to go along with it. if the training concepts sound too harsh i'm sorry, you should try them some time though.

[No_Know]

How long is the rope?

[GeneChing]

Could Exercising In Frigid Temperatures Make Us Healthier?
January 1, 20195:00 AM ET
PAUL CHISHOLM


Winter swimmers enjoyed an icy dip in Poland's Garczyn lake last February. Recorded air temperature was around 14 degrees Farenheit, and a large ice hole had to be cut to allow the lake bathing.
NurPhoto/Getty Images

When Scott Carney first saw the photo of a nearly naked man sitting comfortably on a glacier in the frigid cold, he was skeptical.

The man — Wim Hof — is a Dutch athlete who claims to control his body temperature in extreme cold through sheer force of will. Exercising in the cold, Hof argues, makes people healthier.

"I actually flew out there with the intention of debunking him as a fraud," says Carney, a Colorado-based journalist, author and senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.

But after learning Hof's methodology — a combination of meditation, breathing exercises and immersion in icy cold water — Carney became a believer.

"In a matter of a few days, I was meditating on the bank of a snowy river in Poland in ridiculous, freezing winter, and melting the snow around me with my body temperature," Carney says.

Carney details that experience in his book, What Doesn't Kill Us, which was released in 2017 and recently came out in paperback.

Carney points out that humans dealt with cold temperatures for much of their evolutionary history. Introducing a bit of chill into our daily life now, he says, stimulates muscles and tissue in a good way.

"Our bodies need to be in constant variation," Carney says. "That's what keeps us healthy and fit."

But how does that translate to the way most of us exercise?

Is jogging in the cold this winter any better than hitting a treadmill in a warm gym? How about jumping into a frigid ocean for a swim?

Article continues after this message from our sponsor

We asked some leading physiologists to weigh in.

Burning extra calories

Many of the purported benefits of cold hinge on brown fat, sometimes referred to as "good" fat. Long known to exist in human infants, brown fat burns calories and generates heat.

Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, a researcher at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School, was among the first scientists to document the existence of brown fat in very small amounts in adults in the mid-2000s.

People can increase their levels of brown fat by being in mildly cold environments, Kahn says, though the effect on the number of calories they burn will be relatively small.

"The average person will burn an extra 100 to 200 calories a day when brown fat is activated," Kahn says. "But if you go eat half a muffin, forget it."

And that "100 to 200 calories" figure is for someone who's chilly all day long, he says. Most people experience cold for only short periods of time.

"When you activate brown fat, it may stay active for a few hours," Kahn says. "Not permanently."

Kahn also warns that Hof's call for exposure to the extreme cold could be overkill.

"What it takes to activate brown fat is very mild degrees of cold," Kahn says. "If I put you in a room at 60 or 62 degrees Fahrenheit and you're dressed in very light clothing, that's enough to do it."

A second way that people can burn extra calories when they're cold is through shivering. But Kahn doesn't suggest that strategy, either, because shivering makes most of us miserable.

"It's a way to burn extra energy," Kahn says. "But I don't think there's any data to say that this is a good way to lose weight ... because it's not comfortable."

Furthermore, people often warm up when they exercise, notes John Castellani, a research physiologist with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Since you have to feel cold to burn those extra calories, Castellani says, people who exercise outside might not actually be burning any more calories than those who are in a warm room.

Exercising the blood vessels

A side effect of exposure to the extreme cold that Hof calls for is vasoconstriction. When you're subjected to extreme cold, the muscles surrounding many of your blood vessels cause them to contract — sending more blood to your core, where it can stay warm.

Carney says that because modern humans live in temperature-controlled environments, "all of that musculature is weak." Exercising those muscles through cold exposure, he claims, has "a huge impact on circulation and arterial health."

Castellani says the theory is interesting but still untested.

"In terms of using [cold] as a way of ... 'training the blood vessels?' To my knowledge there's no data to support that claim," says Castellani.

Additionally, Dr. Aaron Cypess, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health worries that cold-induced vasoconstriction could have negative consequences for some people, including spikes in blood pressure.

"We were looking at someone in one of our mild cold studies, and his blood pressure went really high," Cypess says. "That's not a good thing."

Training the immune system

One of Wim Hof's more startling claims — that he could consciously control his immune system — drew the attention of Matthijs Kox, a researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

"At first we were a little bit reluctant, but then we started to look up all the remarkable feats he had pulled off," explains Kox. "So we decided to give him a chance to prove his claim."

To put Hof to the test, Kox and his team injected Hof with a solution containing pieces of E. coli bacteria. Since the injection didn't contain live bacteria, it couldn't actually make Hof sick. But in most people, these bacterial compounds would fool the body into believing it is being attacked, triggering a temporary immune response that includes fever and inflammation. If Hof could indeed suppress his immune system, then the injection would have no such effect.

Sure enough, Hof's body showed little reaction to the injection.

"He had virtually no symptoms — which was remarkable," Kox says.

Kox followed up, repeating the test on a group of individuals whom Hof had trained. Just as with Hof, people in the study who had received the training showed little reaction to the injection. But untrained control subjects experienced fevers, headaches and chills. Kox and his research team published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2014.

Suppressing your own immune system may be possible, those results suggest — but for many of us, this may seem counterproductive. Why would we risk getting sick?

Carney thinks that sort of suppression might benefit patients who are suffering from autoimmune disorders — such as forms of arthritis that are linked to the body's immune system essentially attacking itself. If people could suppress their immune system as Hof does, Carney contends, some could potentially cure themselves of those diseases.

Kox is cautiously optimistic that this could, indeed, someday be a treatment strategy.

"We still have to test it, but it might be beneficial in conditions associated with an overactive immune response," Kox says. "But we need more work — more proof — to see whether this is really beneficial."

But which component of Hof's training contributed to the outcome? Was it the cold exposure, or the breathing exercises and meditation?

Kox says he can't tell from his findings, but he is currently supervising an experiment to find out. He expects those results to be published within the next couple of years. Until then, the value of cold exposure as a treatment for autoimmune disease remains largely unproven, if promising.

The case for cold?

The bottom line is, there is little evidence so far to suggest that training in cold weather makes you healthier, or that you can burn significantly more calories. The physiologists Shots talked to all agreed on one thing: There simply hasn't been enough research to say one way or another.

Cypess says he isn't ready to dismiss the potential benefits. But until he sees more compelling data, he's not likely to suggest it as a therapy. He has a bigger priority.

"The most important thing is to get the person to exercise," Cypess says. "There is no obvious added benefit to exercising in the cold."

Paul Chisholm is a freelance science writer in Rapid City, S.D. You can reach him on Twitter: @PaulJChisholm.

Well, that's reassuring. I hate training in the cold.

[GeneChing]

I knew there'd be some news on this somewhere about now, thus my post above. I just felt it.

Martial artists ring in 2019 with icy plunge
Rose Lundy rose.lundy@tdn.com Jan 2, 2019



For the past three decades, Steve Larson has welcomed each new year by wading into icy waters with fellow martial artists. Tuesday marked the last time Larson will do the polar plunge as an owner of Longview’s Academy of Kung Fu.

Larson, 65, has sold the school to 21-year-old former student and current head instructor Eric Beattie.

But Larson says retirement won’t keep him from dipping in Lake Merwin near Ariel with other kung fu enthusiasts on Jan. 1 each year.

“I’ll do the plunge even if I have to have a walker,” he said with a laugh.

The plunge started in 1971 on the Kalama River as a way for martial arts students to challenge themselves and get out of their comfort zones, Larson said. After growing in popularity, the plunge eventually moved to Lake Merwin to have more room.

At noon on the sunny, but brisk, first day of 2019, about 80 people from seven martial arts schools across the region gathered to briefly join hands before marching into the still lake.

At 35 degrees, Tuesday’s plunge was milder than previous years, Larson said. One year, the sleet blew sideways at the swimmers and the windchill was below 0 degrees.

“We do tough things sometimes … and when we do difficult things together, it strengthens a bond,” he said.

Jason Ramsey, 31, drove up from Vancouver for his tenth polar plunge at Lake Merwin. He studies at Moy Martial Arts and Tai Chi Academy in Vancouver.

“They say you should let the cold drive your New Year’s resolution into you and let the cold water wash the old year off of you,” Ramsey said before the plunge. “And it’s fun to get with friends and do the same incredibly stupid thing.”

16-year-old Mikaela Jones, who also trains in Vancouver, said coming out of the cold water feels like an accomplishment each time.

“It starts the year off with the mindset that if you do a hard thing and come back, it shows you where you can go if you push yourself,” Jones said.

Those characteristics — confidence, self-discipline and respect — are important values that the Longview Academy of Kung Fu teaches students ranging from age 4 to 40, Eric Beattie said.

“(This event) is important because it shows our spirit: No one wants to do this, (but) the black belt is a long journey and there are things you don’t want to do but you have to,” he said.

Larson told the gather swimmers that the plunge “anchors” his life. He added afterwards that it is important to carry on traditions. He took over from former Castle Rock Police Chief Bob Heuer in the 1990s. And now Beattie will run the school.

“At a certain point, the mentor has to step back and let the new generation take over. And he’s doing an incredible job,” he said.

“Symbolic rebirth,” a nearby student suggested. Larson paused to consider the phrase.

“ ‘Symbolic rebirth’ — I like that.”